


Snapshots

by LyssaTerald



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:14:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22119214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LyssaTerald/pseuds/LyssaTerald
Summary: Snapshots of Sigyn throughout her life at different points in time.
Kudos: 3





	1. Summoning

It started with Hitler’s obsession for the supernatural. Howard found something that should have been left forgotten, but-like the scientist and father he was, he didn’t let it die. The crackling energy dissipated as Howard knelt in the summoning circle. She floated there in the darkness, glaring down at him. “Do you know what you cost me, mortal?” she asked, voice cold. “No, but it worked. It worked. For my son,” he breathed, more awed that he wasn’t dead. She hesitated, touching down to the earth and it was the first time Howard noticed she was covered in blood, dark green blood.

“Your son?” she asked unsteadily.

“Anthony Howard Stark,” Howard answered. “I got a…message…from the past. He needs someone I can’t be. I have to be the aloof. I need…He needs someone. He needs someone to be there for him. Someine to be a guardian. “

“Your bargain?”

"Made for my son,” he said. “I accept.”


	2. A Red Ruin

It was a normal day for Tony Stark. He had a glass of scotch in one hand, a tablet in the other, and a bottle of that same scotch to his left. There were designs that were going through his head, some of which would fit well with his current designs and some of which were being tweaked and shelved for future suit designs. Most of his collection had been blown up after the Mandarin incident, but the urge to tinker never quit bothering him so he was down in his workshop poking at designs again.

Maybe he should have felt guilty about breaking this much of his promised to Pepper, but he hadn’t _built_ anything, so he reckoned this was at least safe. Besides, he could never quite forget the way Sigyn’s eyes had lit up the first time they had successfully built a tech/magic device that worked within itself. That little project had been the start of a snowball effect that they hadn’t been able to stop, making more and more things as more and more magic users came out in fights and continued to beat down the Avengers. She’d been the reason one of his last suits of armor had withstood the blast that Loki had thrown at him, trying to pierce the defenses and find an opening.

If he hadn’t known their history as well as he did, he might have been shocked to see how much vindication she took in helping to thwart some of Loki’s nastier plots. Estranged or not, she was set on thwarting her husband in the quiet, little ways that she had access to. Being pulled from her own timeline at random points to be thrown into his path wasn’t something he was sure he could entirely wrap his head around, but she had been around in his life for a very long time, almost as long as he could remember. All of the important points, in fact.

He set the tablet aside and finally admitted to himself that he was still tinkering because he wasn’t sure how else to connect with Sigyn. It wasn’t love that he felt for her, not exactly, but it was something almost as strong as he felt for Pepper, something comfortable and known. She’s given him a stability that he had sorely been lacking in his childhood and a kind of companionship he hadn’t found anywhere else except with the Avengers and Pepper. If Pepper wanted him to choose…

But it hadn’t come to that, not even after Sigyn’s presence in his life had been discovered and explained during the invasion. It hadn’t been a _comfortable_ conversation, _exactly_ , but Pepper had seemed to accept that Sigyn had a different, albeit _odd_ , place in his life than even the Avengers.

Almost as if thinking of her could summon her, there was a ripple of familiar air that he had grown accustomed to across most of his life, but something about this time made him frown. It never took her longer than a second to teleport into his space and then he saw why her spell had taken more than that moment.

Her dark hair contrasted sharply with the paleness of her face as blood was gushed between the fingers she had wrapped tightly around her throat. It flowed brightly over her fingers, down her throat, and over her green armor. He didn’t think about it before he had grabbed a towel and run to her.

Sigyn took a staggering step forward, collapsed into his arms, and dragged them both to the ground. Tony got the towel across her throat and pressed so hard he was sure he was strangling her, but she only kept his hand there with her own and tightened the grip to the point of pain. “Heal yourself, damnit!” he snarled at her as the panic began spreading with the growing crimson stain beneath his hand.

She glared at him, gurgled something that resulted in a blood bubble forming and popping on her lips, and then flickered a spell at him. She _was_ trying to heal herself, he realized.

“Shit!” he muttered, and then extricated his hand from her grip to bolt up and across the work room to begin throwing things out of his way in his search for the _thing._

They had never named most of their projects, but there was one he remembered vividly since it had made little sense to him at the time. Now, though, it made perfect sense. She’d helped talk him through the mechanics of a power amplifier. It had been damn useful when he’d gone against the hulk once or twice, but it wasn’t where he remembered putting it!

He tore through another pile of junk before he found it lying under a replication of Cap’s shield. The shield was unceremoniously dumped as he took off for her side again and shoved the delicate device into her hand. She gave it a look, then him.

“Its the amplifier, use it!”

He didn’t wait for another look before he took her hand and guided her through how to use it, linking it to her power as he had his arc reactor in the past and sending more power back into her spell. Her arm spasmed, but he held her steady as he added pressure to her throat again. Slowly, feeling the seconds like hours, he watched the red ruin of her throat slow to a trickle and then mere droplets of blood as the neat slice in her skin became an angry, red scar.

Finally, she collapsed back onto the concrete of the work shop and let out a shaky breath. Tony took a moment to look at the amount of blood that had been splashed across him and his work shop as he got up and reclaimed his drink, downing it, and then splashing a lot more into the glass.

“Replication spell?” he asked warily, not sure where else to take the conversation.

“Yeah…bleeding…too fast to…keep…replication and…healing…up…together,” she panted.

“Wanna explain what happened? Or is it too early to know?”

She waved a hand in the air. “Doesn’t…really…matter. Give me…a minute,” she panted at him.

He gave her the minute while she fought to regain her breath and poured himself another full glass of the scotch before sipping on it. Looking at all the blood, he almost couldn’t believe she had survived. “So, what happened, princess?” he prompted after another minute.

She lifted her head a fraction to glare at him, but there was no force to it before he headed thumpbed back to the concrete and she remained sprawled. “I couldn’t…tell you…how it happened…only the results….Loki’s brothers…Helblinde and Býleistr…combined forces with…my sister, Ambrogoda…to assassinate me…They were afraid…Loki and I would…combine forces to take…the thrones of…Vanaheim and Jotunheim…from them.” She was sounding better, but still winded.

“You wouldn’t have bothered, but now you’re going to do it to spite them and maybe kill them for the enchanted blade stunt that almost killed you,” Tony inferred and she gave him a slanted _look_ that he took as _yes, she absolutely would._ Tony just sipped at his scotch, reflecting that as good a relationship as they had, Sigyn wasn’t always the nicest person.

They sat in silence for a while as Sigyn’s breathing recovered and Tony finished his third glass of scotch before she was able to push herself into a sitting position. “This device,” she said, finally, looking at the object in her hand.

It was small and a little delicate looking, but the silver casing was vibranium and allowed for the magic to flow freely through the more techy parts without frying anything. It had taken them three different attempts to get it right, but the result had been well worth the effort. “Glad we made it,” he muttered. “It helped with the hulk once or twice after we finished it.”

She gave him another _look_ , one he was all too familiar with, and he made one back at her. “You haven’t made it yet, have you?”

“No,” she answered, tucking the device away. “Too early in my timeline it seems, but at least I know what its meant to do.”

They studied each other for a long moment, the same questions as ever bubbling up. _How much was too much foreknowledge? How would paradoxes resolve themselves if they slipped up?_ But, as ever, they went unasked. In the end, she left the and he cleaned up the mess that was his shop so that Pepper wouldn’t ask the uncomfortable questions he knew he should have asked himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A whole chapter this time. Maybe the shorts have something to them! They appear to want to connect so I'll let it run wild for now.


	3. Return to Asgard

She was a stand out amongst the crowd even among Asgard’s finest. It wasn’t the blue and green armor the swirled around her for and highlighted the ice and leaves, not the daggers that she was making no effort to conceal, nor even the two different guards that she had brought with her, though the Jotun was making the other guests more nervous than her Vanir guard. Rather, it was the aloof way that she held back from the Asgardians, the chilly look that she gave Thor’s Shield companions, and the ease with which she avoided most conversation with the other ambassadors that had been invited to Odin’s “celebration” at the completion of the reconstruction of the Bi-Frost.

It was the first formal gathering that the Vanir and Jotun rulers had attended at Asgard’s behest in a long, long time. That those rulers were one and the same in the form of Sigyn gave most of Odin’s court pause. The last time many of them had seen her had been at the execution of her sons to prevent a war with the dwarfs. They had heard the rumors, seen the complete annihilation of the ruling dwarven family that had had a direct hand in forcing the issue of the deaths of Narvi and Vali, but no one had _seen_ her hunting them.

The rumors of the downfall of the ruling dwarven family had been a source of favorite speculation for their court for a long time. There was even a long standing bet that there had actually been some kind of internal strife that had sent the family mad and after eachother, almost right down to their smallest children. Except those children had not been killed and they were the rulers now, with a healthy dose of respect for Asgard _and_ the Vanir, the last of which no one had thought to question.

Seeing Sigyn among them again was like a shot of ice through their veins as they recalled the slip of a woman kneeling on the floor, covered in the blood of her family, and screaming her grief to the heavens. She was different, hardened, more warrior like than the shy healer who had served them so faithfully for almost a millennia. Ruler to both the Jotuns and Vanir, they could only wonder how she had come to be as such.

It was the cold shot of ice through their veins that had them shivering with remembrance at a part of the Healer's oath she had taken when she had entered their service, "Faith given unto faith until faith be broken." That day, no one could deny that faith had been broken with her.

**Author's Note:**

> This is has been an intensely difficult year and I haven’t been able to sit down and write my main stories, but there are some one shots that have been bouncing around my head. I’m doing 500-1000 word shorts to try and get my brain moving again and I may or may not come back to them later depending on interest. So let me know what you guys think! It was a little shorter here, but got things rolling for me!


End file.
